Parliamentary Budget Office Launches New Federal Employment Tracking Tool
The Parliamentary Budget Office launched a new, interactive federal employment tracking tool to help parliamentarians and Canadians better understand changes in the federal public service.
The Federal Employment Tracking Tool contains detailed information about the federal public service workforce and full-time equivalents (FTEs). The tool lets users explore recent and historical employment trends across the entire government or by department, agency and type of employment on a quarterly basis. The federal government currently provides public employment data by department and agency on an annual basis only.
As Parliamentary Budget Officer Annette Ryan explained, “In the past decade, federal public service employment expanded steadily, rising from 249,000 full-time equivalents in 2015-16 to 358,000 in 2024-25 on an annual basis. This new tool will help Parliamentarians and Canadians hold the government to account on a more real-time basis on its commitment from Budget 2025 to reduce the size of the federal public service by “about 40,000 positions or 10 per cent” by 2028-29. Our tracker will follow federal employment changes by quarter and fiscal year for every department and agency in an easy-to-use format.”
Staff-related expenses are the federal government’s biggest operating expenditure. By providing easy and transparent access to these data, the tool aims to support the work of parliamentarians in overseeing public finances and reviewing government staffing decisions.
"Parliamentarians need reliable and readily available information in order to review changes in government employment levels in order to question Ministers about what that means for public services to Canadians. This tool provides them with objective, timely data that they can use to support their work,” said Ms. Ryan.
The new tool includes two complementary measurements: • the workforce, measuring the number of individuals employed by the federal public service; • full-time equivalents (FTE), measuring the number of hours worked and how the work force is being used.
The data were calculated by the PBO based on monthly information obtained from the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, the Department of National Defence and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
This tool is now available on the PBO website and will be updated quarterly going forward.
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